


the table is prepared for you

by roadtripexpert



Series: from a past life, future light [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Drabble, Found Family, Immortal Husbands, Introspection, M/M, Team as Family, feeling displaced until you don't!, the amorphous concept of home, the emotional consequences of being immortal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25228744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roadtripexpert/pseuds/roadtripexpert
Summary: Nile quizzes Joe and Nicky about the places they’ve been while Andy is out getting groceries and can’t scoff at her newness. They’re in Ecuador, just outside of Quito, the night rain starting on the plexiglass roof.The first time she left her hometown was on active duty, now she’s in new places so often time seems to blur.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: from a past life, future light [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1958098
Comments: 24
Kudos: 897





	the table is prepared for you

Nile is used to picking up and moving. She’s used to being part of a team. But two months in and she still isn't used to the way this team moves.

Their departures aren’t scheduled. In the army, departures had been one part of a well-oiled machine. 

Now, they arrive at different locations either days ahead or hours before a mission, and move even when there isn’t an op. 

They seem to rely on feelings and whims. If Andy wants to spend the day on the road blasting whatever trashy European pop is on the radio, they’ll do it, and end up in a different town, different beds to sleep in. If Joe and Nicky want time for themselves, Nile and Andy take a plane to Mongolia and spar for days on end. Or Andy drops her off at an apartment in Berlin and goes who knows where, leaving Nile with only a credit card and a German dictionary to wander the city with. 

When she first met Andy, Nile knew she wouldn’t be looking back, this woman with eons inside of her, who looked so strong and so fragile all at once.

The boys had taken some getting used to. And now that Booker is gone, Nile feels herself off balance. 

She was just learning this team, this family, and suddenly a limb of the original body goes missing. She doesn’t know how to feel, still reeling from the number that Joe and Nicky set for him to be alone. 

She can barely conceptualize one hundred years. Her chest aches for Andy, willing to leave a friend perhaps forever in order to maintain peace. Her chest aches for the time her family has left. 

She quizzes Joe and Nicky about the places they’ve been while Andy is out getting groceries and can’t scoff at her newness. They’re in Ecuador, just outside of Quito, the night rain starting on the plexiglass roof. 

The first time she left her hometown was on active duty, now she’s in new places so often time seems to blur. 

“Home will always be my favorite place,” Nicky says. “But, we have spent the most time—all of us together—on the steppes. Decades, when there were moments of stillness, of quiet.” He looks over at Joe in the chair next to him, their hands resting together on Nicky’s knee, smirks. “Joe here likes modernity.” 

Nile laughs as Joe’s face spreads into false shock. 

“Lies and slander.” 

Then to Nile: “He’s mostly joking. I do like the cities, but you learn to love the places that are older than you. The rocks that are older than you.” 

Wind from the window cutouts fills the space, rain is getting into pots and pans on the sills. 

Nile voices what she’s been meaning to say for days now, or really, since the moment she met Joe and Nicky and saw they didn’t hold the same anger, the same sadness that Andy and Booker did.

“And you never get bored of it? The world?” 

They smile at each other. “The world…” Nicky starts, “it’s absurd, isn’t it? We are impossible and yet we exist.”

“It isn’t only that we found each other, it is that we help each other see that there is always a new day.” Joe says, and leans forward. “I hope we can be that for you too, even Andy.”

“Even me, what?” Andy says, appearing in the doorway, soaked to the bone and carrying a generous accumulation of fruits, vegetables and small items in colorful wrappers. Andy has a habit of picking the brightest packaging without any regard for what’s inside. Nile finds that she loves Andy for that, one of many recent surprises. 

“We were wondering if you ever got bored of the world,” Nicky says smoothly. 

“Eh,” Andy says placing the goods and her motorcycle helmet down on the table, “most of the time the world can go fuck itself, but it has its moments.”

Joe turns to Nile with a smile that makes his eyes crinkle in their corners, “Well, there you go.” 

Nile hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

“Don’t wait on my account,” Andy says as she starts to strip out of her wet clothes. And that’s something that Nile still has to get used to. Although the army was similar, there’s something more familiar about the lack of boundaries they have with each other. She realizes they all have to have seen each other naked over the millennia, but still averts her eyes. 

Maybe in a hundred years, she thinks wryly. 

Andy pulls up sweatpants and throws on one of Joe’s shirts. Joe, his mouth filled with persimmon, protests, but Andy’s already made a beeline to the stove to fry up some plantains. Nicky makes a mocking pouty face in Nile’s direction. 

She laughs with them. These people who are now her team and family. They make her laugh just by being with them. Belly laughs. The kind she used to have at family gatherings talking with cousins and Aunties. 

It doesn’t replace that hole in her chest, the knowledge that taking back that life would hurt her family even more than her death. But it creates a new avenue. A new place that can be carved out. In the rain. Anywhere in the world.

Nile scoops too-sweet dulce de leche out of its red container with a plantain chip. The building they're staying in is one room, kitchen and sleeping area all in one, with three pallets on the floor. None of them are what you might call neat, their things strewn out over the floor and over each other's beds. Nile for one is glad to shed the army regulations of rigid neatness, it makes the place look lived-in, even if they’ve only been there for a few days and are leaving even sooner.

Nile realizes with a start that it feels like home. This place where she can be rocked to sleep by the three other bodies breathing together around her. 

She looks back up from her desert to laugh at another joke Joe made about him and Nicky killing each other, which Nile has learned is both their favorite kind of joke. Andy is badgering them to tell her how much they like her plantains, and Nicky is pretending that they’re horrible. 

The smell of the forest, of living things, the deep scent of wet earth seeps in through the windows.

She’s happy. 

And she’s home. 


End file.
